Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan, and this is another episode of Bewildered. You know it. The podcast for people trying to, that’s right, figure it out. Yeah. So how you doing, Marty?

Martha Beck:
For someone who has figured nothing out, I am tolerably well. Thank you. And you?

Rowan Mangan:
Tolerably well. You can tolerate your own wellness.

Martha Beck:
Barely. How about you?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I’m good. I haven’t had enough sleep lately.

Martha Beck:
No kidding.

Rowan Mangan:
Don’t know if I’ve mentioned it to you two or three times an hour for the last week. But yeah, I’ve been on a little insomnia jag.

Martha Beck:
As you crawl from room to room. It really has been bad.

Rowan Mangan:
The one good thing, the one good thing about it is that complaining always makes it better.

Martha Beck:
There is nothing that complaining doesn’t make better, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Absolutely.

Martha Beck:
Complaining and 4,000 milligrams of caffeine.

Rowan Mangan:
So much caffeine. Oh my God, so much caffeine. But don’t worry, Marty. We’ve got this.

Martha Beck:
All right. I’m not sure what we’ve got, probably the virus that Lila’s been dealing with that keeps you up at night, but whatever we’ve got, we’ve got it. We’ve got this! Ah. So what are you trying to figure out in a broader, more philosophical sense?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know. You. Always you. One way or another, you’re-

Martha Beck:
Oh, of course. Good luck.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re a puzzle. You’re an enigma. And you’re also super cute.

Martha Beck:
Oh, thank you.

Rowan Mangan:
An enigma wrapped in bacon. That just grossed me out as I said it. I wish I hadn’t said it. I wish I could time travel.

Martha Beck:
It’s my beauty secret. I’m continuously wrapping myself in bacon.

Rowan Mangan:
It’d be a great blurb for your next book. We could just get Liz Gilbert or someone to just write, “Martha Beck is an enigma wrapped in bacon.”

Martha Beck:
Enfolded by aluminum foil, yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Enfolded?

Martha Beck:
Sweetly enveloped. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So this is my cute little story for the listeners about you for the week-

Martha Beck:
Oh dear. Oh no.

Rowan Mangan:
… because I want them to know, because you play a bit of a persona on this podcast, and I just want them to know that it is absolutely not contrived and 100% just what you’re like. So a friend of ours had a birthday this past week.

Martha Beck:
True.

Rowan Mangan:
And we wanted to go get her some flowers. So we looked at our little chores and who had the time and who had the car, and you were nominated to be the one to go pick up the flowers.

Martha Beck:
For once.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a big responsibility.

Martha Beck:
Because no one trusts me to drive. Let’s just make that clear. Nobody trusts me to drive. So yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
They were dire circumstances.

Martha Beck:
They were desperate. They let me have the keys.

Rowan Mangan:
So off you went to get the flowers, and as you sort of guiltily confessed later on, you didn’t just go and get flowers, did you?

Martha Beck:
What did I do? What did I do? Am I a werewolf?

Rowan Mangan:
You told us that you did go and get the flowers. You absolutely did. You are trustworthy. You picked up the flowers, but then you remembered that someone had told you that at the canal nearby, there were beavers.

Martha Beck:
Well, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And so you told me later that night, “I didn’t just go to get the flowers and come home. I went off to look for beavers.”

Martha Beck:
I did. I did.

Rowan Mangan:
And you were like, “But there was nowhere to park, so I parked illegally.” And you were so scared about getting a ticket or something because we’d entrusted you with the sacred flower mission that you had to check on the beavers. So you had to park illegally. So you didn’t want to get a ticket. So you raced to the beavers in order to quickly check on them and then get back to the car.

Martha Beck:
The alleged beavers. I did not see them. I sprinted to the alleged beaver location. That should be-

Rowan Mangan:
I thought you saw one of them now.

Martha Beck:
Well, that was later, because I’ve been back.

Rowan Mangan:
Of course you have. But this is the first I’ve heard of it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, so the other day when I had to do something like medical, I thought, “Well, doctor’s appointments take a little extra time,” so I parked legally.

Rowan Mangan:
Uh oh.

Martha Beck:
Took quite a little jog to the alleged beaver location and just crouched there. Oh, Ro, there’s a pile of sticks. They’ve made a pile of sticks. And I just sat there and looked at the pile of sticks, and there were fish jumping, and I thought, “This is magical,” and I just squatted there on my haunches the way I do. And in the middle of just sitting there, I hear this … And from under the pile of sticks came a little furry head.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh.

Martha Beck:
And it swam around for me.

Rowan Mangan:
It might’ve been Joshua, the stuffed monkey, because I made that mistake with Lila once, a little furry head came along and I thought it was our daughter, and it turned out just to be Joshua, the inanimate monkey toy.

Martha Beck:
If I had thought of it, I would’ve taken Joshua, the stuffed monkey, and sacrificed him by throwing him into the beaver dam just as bait, like a decoy. I would’ve sacrificed anything to see that beaver.

Rowan Mangan:
I love the idea that in your world a stuffed monkey is beaver bait.

Martha Beck:
We are skating so close to the edge. Wait, no. Sailing so close to the wind. I don’t know what that means, but they say it. Skating on thin ice. We are skating so close to the wind right now because of the unfortunate-

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
[inaudible 00:06:12]

Rowan Mangan:
We don’t have to say it.

Martha Beck:
We don’t have to say. But just-

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s just leave it. Let’s be grownups about this and just let it be there without having to pick at it.

Martha Beck:
And being lesbians, it’s … Ugh. Yeah, I’m just going to leave it there. I’m not saying a thing. I will just say, I would sacrifice any of our daughters’ toys to see another beaver.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe on your birthday, honey.

Martha Beck:
What is wrong with us?

Rowan Mangan:
For God’s sake.

Martha Beck:
It’s just like animals.

Rowan Mangan:
Dig us out of this hole. What are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
I’m trying to figure out, I’ve started drawing and painting a lot, as you know, because it’s the thing I love most in the world. And what seems to surprise you and Karen is that part of what I love most in the world is to go into an absolutely tyrannical rage, like a two-year-old when I can’t get something to look the way I want it.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s dark, guys. It’s not like how she’s cute like when she’s telling stories like this. It’s quite scary energy when Martha goes into an outrage.

Martha Beck:
A watercolor rage, especially, because you can’t erase watercolor. And I have a friend who’s an artist, actually, it’s one of my children. So that might be why she also goes into a rage when she’s doing her art. She’s really good. And we bonded over our art rage the other day. But then it’s worse because with the internet, I can actually go on and I see these brilliant artists and they post videos explaining how to do things, which I’ve never had in my life. I’m totally self-taught except for one class. And the thing is that artist videos will drive you mad because they’re in the right side of their brains, and that does two things. It takes out time, so they’re not aware time is passing, and it takes out language so they can’t talk.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, so these are live videos of people painting and supposedly talking about what they’re doing and explaining it to you?

Martha Beck:
Yes. And what it is, is 45 minutes of dab, dab, dab, dab, dab. “Well, now …” Dab, dab, dab, dab. “You see how I … Oh, okay. Wait, no. All right.” Dab, dab. “You can fix that.” Dab, dab. I’m speeding this up, actually. This is over an hour and a half. “Now you’re going to see some magic.” Dab, dab, dab, dab, dab, dab. Never say another word about it.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like I could be a TikTok sensation by secretly filming you in an outrage, because it’s a very different sort of energy from what you’re describing there.

Martha Beck:
It’s indescribable. And then you’re trying to watch this person who has no sense of time and no language, who purports to be teaching you what to do to get out of your art rage, and it just makes you homicidal along with … I don’t know what the art rage does. It makes you want to just become a hurricane and destroy everything.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
But then you get it to work, and it’s totally worth it. It’s like, “Ohhhh!” Yeah, heaven.

Rowan Mangan:
She has this whole other life.

Martha Beck:
Heaven.

Rowan Mangan:
Amazing.

Martha Beck:
Heaven!

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out, my love.

Martha Beck:
I doubt that. But I’m going to keep trying because that’s what we do, because we’re bewildered.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. I have a favor to ask. You might not know this, but ratings and reviews are like gold in the podcasting universe. They get podcasts in front of more faces, more eyes, more ears, all the bits that you could have a podcast in front of, that’s what they do.

So it would help us enormously, if you would consider going over to your favorite podcasting app, especially if it’s Apple, and giving us a few stars, maybe even five, maybe even six. If you can find a way to hack the system, I wouldn’t complain. And a review would also be wonderful. We read them all and love them. So thank you very much in advance. Let’s just go out there and bewilder the world.

Martha Beck:
And what is our topic?

Rowan Mangan:
Today? Yeah, let’s get to it. So we’re always talking about anxiety one way or another, aren’t we, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Well, even if we’re not talking about it, it’s always there, right?

Rowan Mangan:
It’s always the subtext.

Martha Beck:
Right. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. We’re anxious little bunnies. But now it’s fun to be an anxious bunny because Marty’s working on a book about anxiety, and so we’re learning all about it, we’re thinking all about it, we’re talking all about it, and all your research is so amazing.

Martha Beck:
I know. So we thought, “Well, let’s do it.” There are many aspects of it, actually. It’s a very big topic. So we thought, “Let’s do some episodes about this and write a book and teach a course and do all the things.” But this episode is our first anxiety episode so far.

Rowan Mangan:
I mean, in a way, they’ve all been anxiety episodes for me, but it’s just in a subtextual way. I think we’ve probably actually talked about anxiety quite a lot.

Martha Beck:
Oh, you think? It’s like breathing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it is. Deep breath. Nice, long, deep breath.

Martha Beck:
But here’s the thing, we need to talk about it because it’s going so completely ballistic in the entire human population around the world. Anxiety disorders are just climbing and climbing and climbing and climbing. So there’s a fair chance that some of y’all out there listening have a little bit of struggle with this issue.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. So this topic today, though, is … I don’t know, it’s slightly adjacent to it because this is more like something that we’ve noticed about life that has to do with anxiety, I guess, and just how we do life and how anxiety does us in life kind of thing.

Martha Beck:
Yes, it does.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and I keep having conversations with people who are looking for a sense of safety, and they’re looking for a sense of safety the way I look for beavers, like, “It’s something out there and I really, really, really need to find it. And it’s not readily apparent, and I don’t even really know its tracks and I don’t know how to create it.”

And it seems to be actually increase the anxiety as they’re looking for a sense of safety. What I know from the research I’m doing is that the way they’re looking for safety is actually increasing their anxiety. And so, you and I were talking about this and we thought, “We should say this on Bewildered.” Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. It’s fascinating. I don’t know if this is a digression or not, but I feel like there’s this weird continuum in our culture, which is … Whatever. I’m not going to define our culture. You know what I’m talking about, just vaguely American.

Martha Beck:
Go back to the episodes where we-

Rowan Mangan:
North American, western-

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh God, I’m so sick of trying to do that. I’m sorry, everyone. Where you start at safety and it slides on this long spectrum to a point where it’s more like convenience, and it’s like … So, I think about convenience all the time and about how the more convenient our lives get, the harder it becomes to tolerate inconvenience. I mean, people have heard me go on about cup holders on this podcast. It’s-

Martha Beck:
Oh, we’re back to the cup holders.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, look. I have feelings about cup holders. I don’t try to hide it. I also don’t try to bring it up every time I think of it. But think about in the cart at the supermarket, there’s a cup holder in the cart. I mean, genius, but also totally debilitating for us. Once you have taken your coffee to the supermarket and found a cup holder for it to push around in your cart, the next time you come, if there’s no cup holder in that cart and you’ve got your coffee in your hand, you’re screwed. There’s-

Martha Beck:
Right?

Rowan Mangan:
You might as well just leave. Forget about it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and it’s like, “What? No cup holder?”

Rowan Mangan:
And you don’t know what to do anymore, and it’s all bound up with … As companies compete against each other, they’re like … Everything’s so the same that they’re just trying to … The only edge, the only competitive edge, so often, is slightly more convenient way of doing things. And slowly, it’s just getting to a point where we can’t do anything for ourselves. And I feel like this is analogous to how anxiety works.

And there’s all kinds of reasons at the moment where we can get to our point where the tolerance that we have for the discomfort of anxiety starts to actually inhibit how we act, how we’re prepared to live, the risks we’re prepared to take, the amount of vulnerability that we’re prepared to show and so on. So there’s a lot of different reasons for that. But I think a lot of it, recently, is technology and how much we can do. I mean, we joke on this show about how we never leave our house, and we never do.

Martha Beck:
We don’t. We really don’t.

Rowan Mangan:
Except for beaver hunting.

Martha Beck:
Well, yeah. That’s true of any … No, I’m not going down that road.

Rowan Mangan:
No, no, no. That’s what she said.

Martha Beck:
No, it’s true. We’re doing this in our house right now. We’re talking to all the peoples in our house. Why go anywhere? It’s so convenient, and it really is convenient.

Rowan Mangan:
It also feels safe.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. You feel safe in your little cubby hole. And you, by the way, are constantly trying to make smaller cubby holes.

Rowan Mangan:
I know.

Martha Beck:
Now you’re obsessed with moving into a van.

Rowan Mangan:
I want to do a whole episode on that. Let’s not-

Martha Beck:
Oh, at first it was tiny houses, but those aren’t tiny enough now. She wants vans. I’m going to get a little dog crate for you and just crate-train you because you’d be so happy there.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I could make it so cute in there.

Martha Beck:
Be so happy. Have all your supplies along the road. Anyway, there’s a point here, and that is the smaller the space you occupy in terms of your activities in the world, the smaller the space where you feel safe. So during the pandemic, anxiety just zipped up, it went up 25% in the year 2020 alone around the world, right? 25%. The rapidity of that increase is unheard of. When I first read that, I thought, “Well, of course, everyone’s afraid of getting sick and dying, losing their relatives, supply chain problems and everything like that.” There was stuff to be afraid of.

Weirdly, I’ve been writing about this and yet it wasn’t till we were talking about the convenience thing earlier that I saw, “Oh wait, what has been happening as people went into lockdown is increasing mobility in the same way that agoraphobia develops in the human brain.” Okay? I do have a point. There’s something that you can Google that every psychologist in the world knows about. It’s called the anxiety cycle, and the way it works is that somebody has a difficult experience. Let’s use the classic example. Agoraphobia means “fear of the marketplace.” So being in a crowded space is usually the first place that triggers a panic.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s probably just because they forgot to put the cup holders in the cart in the marketplace.

Martha Beck:
No cup holder! I’m never leaving the house. So, what happens is that the human brain is so good at making connections, connects the feeling of panic with that place. So later, people start to avoid that place. It becomes very frightening for them. But the human brain, it just generates fear in certain conditions. And so they’re going to have another panic attack and they’ll be in a different place, say this time it’s at a friend’s house. They’ll stop going to that friend’s house. Then they’ll stop going to any friend’s house. Then they start to get worried when they are in a car. No more cars.

Then they start to get panicky when they’re outside the house and even different rooms in the house. And I’ve known people who were stuck in one room, like a bedroom/bathroom combo for literally years. And the thing is, no matter how tiny you make the space, that space becomes frightening. But going out of the space, because you are so frightened, feels undoable, feels suicidal. And it’s not rational, and people who have it know it’s not rational, but it happens. And when everyone started staying in their houses, I think our comfort zones shrank, literally, as our physical mobility shrank.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so funny how the agoraphobia example is … It’s a metaphor and it’s also a literal kind of factor.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And-

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. That’s so weird that you were just pointing to my tiny house and van life obsession as part of this. But isn’t it cool that if you live in a van … Don’t worry. I’m not going to go on about it for too long, but I just want to say, if you live in a van and you have a teeny little space and you’ve got your little bed there, and you can drive off anywhere and then still go retreat in, go out, retreat in. It’s like mobile agoraphobia, like agoraphobia on the road. That’s going to be my Instagram handle.

Martha Beck:
That’s it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Rowan Mangan, Agoraphobia On The Road. To all the people out there who are suffering from this, we are not mocking it. It is a horrible experience. And more and more people are having it, and we’re not meaning to laugh at you. We’re just laughing with you.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. No, Anxiety sucks.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I just be the first to say? Anxiety sucks and no one is disputing that.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
The thing about-

Martha Beck:
And just in terms of mobility, it reminded me of the tire shredder analogy.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, good. Yeah, I was thinking that because there’s a thing that happens not just in the world, but the way that our brains work and don’t work that exacerbates this tendency, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah. And it has to do with the way we focus on the left hemisphere more than the right hemisphere that’s really involved with it. But what it does, basically, is there’s a little bit of the brain that has an alarm response to something unfamiliar in the left hemisphere, and then that alarm response goes straight to the whole brain, obviously. It goes straight to the whole body and creates a fight/flight/fawn response. But in humans, we have a cortex that can tell stories about the feeling of fear.

So what happens is that you see something unfamiliar, there’s a spark of fear, which is not based on anything rational. It’s a deep animal, instinctual sense of fear. But then the human part of your brain goes, “Oh, there’s a reason for this. I’m going to make up an excuse for why I’m afraid. I’m afraid because it’s a cloudy day and I just don’t like rain. I’m afraid of thunderstorms or whatever.” And it’s so interesting because when they do brain studies and they show an image to the right side of the brain, but the left side can’t see it, and then they ask … Okay, sorry. Let me just wrap this up.

Rowan Mangan:
This is getting very dense, and I don’t see a tire shredder in sight.

Martha Beck:
Ah, okay. But this is the thing, the left side of the brain makes up reasons for whatever is going on inside it. And if there is a fear response for any reason, it will say, “You should be afraid. This is a rational fear,” and it will find something to be afraid of. Like, “That person is looking at me strangely, and I’m afraid of them, and it’s because they are thinking this, this, and this.”

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
So we make up danger. And what that does is, instead of it just going out the way it would with a non-verbal animal, the verbal story feeds back in to the primitive part that sparks fear, and it increases the fear.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, and if you’re looking at me weird, I’m more likely to attach a story to that, which is already a bias that I have? Like you are looking at my double chin and thinking thoughts about it, and so then not only am I afraid, I’m also validated in a belief for a reason to be afraid.

Martha Beck:
Yep. And then you’ll believe that I am somehow thinking negative thoughts about you. And that will increase the amount of fear. So you’ll think, “She’s always judging me anyway,” and then the fight instinct will come in again. And then that story makes you really inflamed, and then you’re more afraid, “That person is really monstrously threatening.” And it creates what is known as an unregulated feedback cycle where what goes up never comes down.

Rowan Mangan:
So you get more anxious and you never get less anxious.

Martha Beck:
That’s correct. So the spark feeds into the verbal story, and the verbal story feeds the spark, and it becomes this conflagration that you believe is real. And because we also have something called a negativity bias, we’re always looking for what’s dangerous, and when you get the combination of those two, the negativity bias that’s always looking for danger, and then this cycle of anxiety that never lets it come down, just keeps it driving it up, you have a recipe for massive, sustained horrific anxiety. And people, I think this is happening to millions, billions of people.

Rowan Mangan:
Tire shredder. Keyword, tire shredder.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. Right. Okay. So tire shredders, if you’re unfamiliar, they’re like these fangy-teethy metal things that are at the exit of a parking garage or whatever. And it will say, “Do not back up. Severe tire damage.”

So if you drive forward and cross them, they all lie down flat, and you drive over them. But then they rear up again. And if you-

Rowan Mangan:
You’re not helping people’s anxiety. Picture teeth, metal teeth rising out of the ground.

Martha Beck:
They rear up again. So if you back up, they will just eat the crap out of your tires. So anxiety works like a tire ripper. You go forward into more and more and more and more and more anxiety, but you can’t back up easily because the fear itself says, “If you don’t stay afraid, you are really in danger.” And I’ve actually had clients say to me, “My intense anxiety is the only thing keeping me safe.”

Rowan Mangan:
It’s amazing how self-evident that even sounds, like the culture around anxiety.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Because the culture and the psychology reinforce each other in this way. You’ve just described the neuromechanics of it, and it all suits. It all fits well together, culture and biology type things.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, biology.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t really like to talk about … But what I do want to talk about in the context of how anxiety works and how messed up it is that we tend towards greater and greater anxiety and don’t really have a ability to reverse back into calm in a direct way, I like talking about courage in the face of anxiety. I don’t feel like we talk about courage enough.

Martha Beck:
We certainly don’t talk about it. I bet if you did a contra-analysis of all the media and all the infinite texts and everything, I bet anxiety would come up a lot more often than the word courage.

Rowan Mangan:
So the thinking that we’ve been describing with that sort of example of agoraphobia is the anxiety that leads you to listen to it and inhibit your behavior, and then it can ramp up in the way you were just describing. And then we can talk about meditation, whatever. Calm. Calm down the anxiety. And that’s quite different from stepping towards the anxiety. And that’s what we thought we’d talk about today with courage. There’s a beautiful quote from Anais Nin, who says, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” And when you think about that example of, “Now I can’t go to my friend’s house. Now I can’t go to the living room,” that’s about life shrinking. And that’s not to say that a agoraphobics don’t have courage or anything like it, but we’re just playing with that today, that idea.

Martha Beck:
Well, it’s like in The Divine Comedy, there are places where Dante is going through and Virgil’s ghost is his guide, and there are places where Virgil comforts him and says, “It’s going to be okay.” And then he gets to certain places where he says, “You’re just going to need courage for this one. I can’t soften this one for you. You’re going to have to bring all your courage, because that’s the only thing you can go on anymore.” And there comes a point when you get anxious enough about enough things that courage is your final … It’s the last straw. It’s the last hope. But it’s a big hope. It’s a huge hope.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. But, I mean, you’re risking … I mean, what’s the greater risk? It’s that kind of question, right?

Martha Beck:
Exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
We wanted to talk a little bit about how that looks for us, because we’re talking about tolerance for the discomfort of anxiety, that sort of thing. So, my areas in my life where my tolerance will shrink really fast, I avoid one situation and I notice that my comfort zone is smaller, that I have to keep pushing back against. So for me, there’s situations where I have a fear of embarrassment or a fear of being seen, which is pretty-

Martha Beck:
Kind of similar.

Rowan Mangan:
Kind of-

Martha Beck:
Is there any difference?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh. I guess they’re all similar, and it’s to do with people and it’s to do with culture, actually. Big one, and I know that the peeps will relate to this, is the fear of social awkwardness.

Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
To me, you would think from my anxiety reactions that a socially awkward situation, you might as well be flaying me alive. I treat the possibility of a long awkward silence with someone I don’t know very well as though I would not survive it. So funny. School pickups. Oh, I don’t even talk to … I’m like, “Oh, I don’t have any mom friends.” I wonder why?

Martha Beck:
It’s so funny. I thought that you were a fragile being at one time, and then I watched you going through medical treatments and enduring things that are incredibly physically painful, and you’re like, “So what?”

Rowan Mangan:
I didn’t have to talk to anyone.

Martha Beck:
“It’s a flesh wound.” And I’m like, “How can you do that?” You’re like, “I didn’t have to talk to anyone.” Yeah, but it’s true. You don’t talk to the other moms when you go to pick up our little one.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. But I will try and extend myself in that area. What’s yours? What are your things where you don’t have high tolerance for discomfort and anxiety?

Martha Beck:
Similar. It all has to do with other people. Sometimes animals. But I’m not afraid of animals in the usual way. I wouldn’t mind if an animal killed me, but I would be very, very upset if an animal were disappointed. I’m not kidding. I cannot stand-

Rowan Mangan:
She’s not kidding.

Martha Beck:
… to see someone or something feeling disappointed. I’m okay with being disappointed, but to watch another being feel disappointed, it’s like being flayed alive. And actually, Lila picked up on this, our two-year-old, because when she has tantrums, you’ll sometimes talk about her feelings with her to help her name them. “Oh, it’s so disappointing when you wanted to go outside and it’s getting dark and you can’t go out.” And the other day she was having a grand … And she practices tantrums. You can hear her in her room going, “Roar! Woo, woo!”

Rowan Mangan:
And literally looking in the mirror.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and then getting to a full throat, “Whaaa!” She could be rented out for special effects in movies.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I just tell them something that’s totally unrelated?

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
So in the bath, when she has a bath … Sorry, Americans. A bath. When she goes in the tub-

Martha Beck:
A bath.

Rowan Mangan:
When she goes in the tub-

Martha Beck:
Say bath. Never stop saying bath.

Rowan Mangan:
I won’t. I won’t. Lila says bath, too. I love it. So what is it? It’s like a tap, I guess, if I wanted to give it a term. A faucet-type thing, but there’s a silver metal round circle that the tap lives in. Okay? I’m sure that’s not the technical term. But-

Martha Beck:
That’s what plumbers call it.

Rowan Mangan:
She can see her reflection in this circle-

Martha Beck:
Aww.

Rowan Mangan:
… when she stands in the bath. And parents, we don’t encourage standing in the bath at this age or ever. What are you doing? Lie down. Aren’t you tired?

Martha Beck:
I found you lying in the bath today.

Rowan Mangan:
She stands there watching herself cry. And if I put my hand over it to block her view, she gets even more distraught and tries to push it away so that she can watch herself cry while standing in the bath. I mean, she’s so her mother’s daughter. And the other day, I was like, “Come on, Lila. Sit down. We’ve got to wash your hair.” And she said, “No, Mommy. I’m crying right now.”

Martha Beck:
That was me. You’re confusing us. I was saying that. Aww.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry. It’s funny. It’s cute.

Martha Beck:
It is funny. And the other day when she was really in the midst of a full shrieking, lying on the ground, “Raaah!” She screams almost incoherently, “I’m so disappointed!”

Rowan Mangan:
You’ve forgotten the context of that. That was in response to having to have her diaper change.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
She was just so disappointed in us.

Martha Beck:
“I’m so disappointed!” I was so hoping to keep this urine soaked rag against my skin for a bit longer. I was like, “No, I’m going to take it and put against my skin.” Anyway, I know that was-

Rowan Mangan:
What the fuck was that?

Martha Beck:
It was a bridge too far, that’s what it was.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s what it was.

Martha Beck:
A bridge too far.

Rowan Mangan:
Several bridges.

Martha Beck:
No, but anything where, especially if I haven’t met people’s expectations, the thought that people will see me as not having done enough, oh my God. Unbearable anxiety. And the only one that comes from inside me is the fear of being exhausted, physically exhausted, like sleep-deprived, as you are now. And I’d have to say those two things are related, as I think about it, that my fear of being fatigued probably goes along with my absolute dread of letting any creature ever be disappointed as long as I live. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t get it.

Martha Beck:
It exhausts me.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, okay.

Martha Beck:
And I’m exhausted.

Rowan Mangan:
So how does fear of fatigue … Do you not go out for a walk or something because you’re so scared you’ll feel fatigued after it?

Martha Beck:
I do things. But it’s-

Rowan Mangan:
How does it affect your behavior?

Martha Beck:
Mainly, it keeps me from traveling.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, that’s right.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Yeah, that makes total sense. Yep.

Martha Beck:
I’ve been unbelievably, torturously exhausted on the various book tours and speaking tours I used to do, and it built up a fear of exhaustion that is really quite debilitating.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, because it went into the cycle thing where it was reinforced by the situation that kept surrounding it. That’s fascinating.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, once collapsed in an airport. Woke up in a hospital. That kind of thing. I mean, it was pretty major.

Rowan Mangan:
Say, look, but listen, you’re trying to make it like, “But it’s a totally justified fear because I woke up in a hospital, da da da da da.” Did you catch that? Instead of going, “Yeah, this is a big anxiety.” You’re like, “It’s a totally rational anxiety.”

Martha Beck:
You make a solid point. You make a solid point. I just wanted the people to know I’m not a wimp.

Rowan Mangan:
Fear of being-

Martha Beck:
A total wimp.

Rowan Mangan:
… seen. Where is it? Fear of being seen as not doing enough was the one you mentioned beforehand.

Martha Beck:
Damn you, Rowan Mangan! You use my words against me. There are some, though, that I’ve gotten over, which goes to the point of this episode. You can get over these things. I used to be afraid, and I think this is huge in our culture, of being wrong.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. I think the academic system really trains people in that direction. Their ego gets very attached to being right, and you can totally see how people wouldn’t put themselves in a situation where they could be tested and found wrong.

Martha Beck:
Look stupid. Yeah, and you’re right, it’s total ego food. And having both of us spend quite a bit of time in the system of academia, you see people … I mean, one of my favorite examples of this is when I wrote in my book, Expecting Adam about how once I went into a Harvard seminar of a sociologist, and I’d been visiting a psychologist friend in her lab, and she was swimming rats around for this particular experiment. And she had a kid’s pool with these little blue cartoons called Smurfs. And I came into this seminar at Harvard and I said, “Sorry I’m late. I was upstairs watching them swim rats around in the Smurf pool,” and they thought I meant a psychologist named Smurf. So then they all started talking about Smurf’s latest work and how they’d all read it.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s brilliant.

Martha Beck:
And how they knew all about it, and everyone was afraid to not know who Smurf was.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, the emperor has no clothes.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, so yeah, all those fears of looking stupid and all of that, I just, at a certain point … Well, when my son was born and he has Down Syndrome, and I was like, “What was I thinking? Of course, I don’t know things. I don’t know anything.” And I just came out with it. And that goes to our whole point about the way culture trains us to deal with these anxieties and the way nature would have us do.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, it’s interesting because, yeah, I mean, I wonder in the same way, if that cycle that you were describing in the brain where this goes to that, feeds back to that, feeds into that, and ramps up the anxiety all the time, I feel like culture and ego do the same thing in a destructive, but I want to say positive in the sense of with a plus, not-

Martha Beck:
Yeah, in an increasing way.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Yeah. And I feel like when we’re talking about courage, we also need to be talking about humility to a certain extent, and that’s where that ego culture comes in because when we are pushing up against a tendency for our lives to get smaller, and now we’re getting into Brené Brown territory as we always end up there because she’s so brilliant. But you do get to a point where the vulnerability of risking being wrong, and you have to start making those calculations of, “Its worth risking being wrong for the richness that these experiences start to bring to my life.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and the honesty. The landing in reality instead of living in this artificially safe world, artificially safe. It’s that metaphor about the king who wanted to cover his kingdom in leather so that nothing would ever hurt his feet. And a shoemaker came along and said, “Why don’t we put some leather on your feet?” And the leather on your feet is courage and humility. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So we’ve touched on what the culture would say about this, but let’s be explicit.

Martha Beck:
It really is about avoiding discomfort. This should be comfortable. Everything should be comfortable. We’ve developed the option of being so comfortable. As you said, every company is trying to edge out every other company in making everything more convenient, everything easier, everything less challenging. And there’s-

Rowan Mangan:
Because I really believe that our tolerance for discomfort gets so tiny that we start mistaking convenience and safety. We start thinking, “If this is less convenient, I should be afraid.”

Martha Beck:
Right, right. Oh, and also, we’re able to be in little small groups of people now because the internet lets us reach out. So we’re not bumping around with a whole bunch of really diverse people.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that’s right.

Martha Beck:
And we talk about diversity-

Rowan Mangan:
Little echo chamber thing.

Martha Beck:
But there are so many echo chambers online, and you don’t have to try to figure out what someone’s saying in a strange accent, or they’re using a different vocabulary than yours. And it’s more convenient to be with people who don’t challenge your thoughts or ideas at all.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, or the obvious one is different politics.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I am not a great one for going out and seeking conversation online with people who don’t agree with my politics.

Rowan Mangan:
Same here, babe.

Martha Beck:
But by the same token, I had an appointment with my foot doctor, and my foot doctor started expressing completely different politics from mine. And I literally was afraid, there in the office. And I had to ask myself, “Am I seeing this person as a human? Am I bringing my humility and my courage here, because I’m really uncomfortable with this and I wish I could just get away from it?”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, that is such a good point. I have a fear reaction to seeing some of those flags and stuff that you see people put outside their houses. That terrifies me. And it’s ridiculous that it terrifies me because, ultimately, there’s a fundamental … Well, maybe not fundamental. There’s a disagreement there, but it starts to feel fundamental, doesn’t it? Because it’s a really good example, Marty, of we’re not challenging ourselves in that way and we are starting to experience fear. And that said, I’m not hugely interested in extending myself in that precise way.

Martha Beck:
Nor am I. But that actually isn’t our point. Out point here is that there’s an underlying assumption that discomfort is not something we should have to tolerate. Any kind of psychological discomfort, or physical discomfort, for that matter. So the culture basically puts into each head of ours the thought, “If I’m uncomfortable, I’m either in totally the wrong place, or something should be done to make me completely comfortable. I need to be comfortable. I deserve to be comfortable all the time. And discomfort is a sign that something’s really, really wrong.”

Rowan Mangan:
That’s right, Yeah, yeah. God.

Martha Beck:
And life isn’t comfortable when you have the message in your head, “Discomfort is dangerous.” You’re going to be uncomfortable, and if you interpret that as danger, you’re going to be so anxious.

Rowan Mangan:
So inconvenience is going to drive you into a tiny zone of safety.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, inconvenience itself can contribute to this growing-

Martha Beck:
All the things we want, ease, lavishness, care, self-care, tenderness, all these things that are really genuinely, positively, wonderfully good, if you refuse to accept discomfort and you say, “This is all I will experience,” the discomfort of anxiety will follow you in and it will make your self-care scary to you. It will literally pollute absolutely everything. Anais Nin was absolutely right. It will shrink your life in proportion to your courage. And the message is you shouldn’t have to keep your life big. Your life should just be big and comfortable at the same time without you having to do anything, which would be lovely.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s someone else’s responsibility.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and that would be lovely, but it’s impossible because the way our brains work. Well, we have to follow nature. So I think we should move on to what we think about that.

Rowan Mangan:
All right. Let’s do that in just a moment. So how do we figure it out? We’ve seen what culture says, but what does nature say?

Martha Beck:
First of all, we talk about nature. Culture and nature is this whole romantic image of dancing around in fields full of butterflies while squirrels feed us nuts. Mother nature is a generous and infinite source, but she is not easy. She doesn’t coddle. Nature doesn’t coddle us. Mother Nature can actually be a heartless bitch, or seem to be.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah, and it’s that indifference. The world is not interested in making your path soft for your little feet. We just read a novel that just reminded us about it, which was just survival out in the woods and difficult circumstances. And it was like, “Oh yeah. No, there’s a lot of different ways that you can just die.”

Martha Beck:
Oh, you can die so fast. At one point, it’s just raining and they’re too tired. The characters in the novel are too tired to change their clothes because they’ve been running from things, and they know if they can’t change their clothes, they’ll die in three hours of hypothermia. You don’t think about that stuff till you’re out there, and then it’s really clear.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m starting to see more and more why people just stay in their room.

Martha Beck:
Remember when we went to see the Redwood Forest in California?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, I do.

Martha Beck:
And we’d been living out near nature, and we were driving on this desolate thing. What did I need? I needed something.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like it was cream or something like that.

Martha Beck:
Well, yeah, like antibiotic cream. I cut myself.

Rowan Mangan:
No, no. I think it was heavy cream.

Martha Beck:
Oh, like to eat?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And we went looking, and I was like, “In this entire Redwood Forest, and these trees were here when Moses was leading the children of Israel, and yet there is no cream to be had?” And I remember saying to you, “I’m all about nature until I need something.”

Rowan Mangan:
Until I need something. It’s a classic Martha Beck moment.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So nature doesn’t say you’re supposed to be comfortable, at all.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
But nature does give you appetites, a brain that teaches you to go looking for things that are going to keep you alive. So it gives you a cautious nature, but also a drive to explore. And I think what nature is asking us all the time, even when we’re living comfortably in our houses, our inner nature is saying, “Explore the limits of your desires. And life isn’t safe, so be aware of that and pay attention and proceed with caution. But you must continue to explore or I will kill you.” That’s what nature says. Because if you never go anywhere or do anything, you’re going to starve to death or die of thirst or whatever.

Rowan Mangan:
And also soul death. I mean, that’s what we’re really talking about.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
Once anxiety and fear-

Martha Beck:
That’s so true.

Rowan Mangan:
… has made your life tiny, then the richness is gone. It starts getting super beige in there.

Martha Beck:
Not even beige. It turns dark. It can get very, very dark in a brain that is just focused on anxiety. I’ve been to those places where anxiety starts to blend with depression. So there is complete leaden inability to move on top of constant shrieking level fear. It actually is Hell.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. That’s a good point.

Martha Beck:
Life without courage-

Rowan Mangan:
Discomfort.

Martha Beck:
… without discomfort, without the willingness to brave discomfort becomes hell. It chases you.

Rowan Mangan:
So culture says, “Be proud of yourself if you’ve eliminated discomfort.” Right?

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
But nature would say, “Be proud if you explore discomfort”?

Martha Beck:
Ooh.

Rowan Mangan:
Is that it?

Martha Beck:
I think that’s true. I think that’s exactly right. I mean, we do see it with our kid where she’s constantly wanting to go to the uncomfortable. There is a drive in her toward things that have hurt her before. I think when we’re little, it’s stronger. In all baby animals, the urge to explore is strong. That’s an interesting thing because the very impulse in the left side of our brain that goes toward fear, in the right side of the brain, if we choose that, is more curious and exploratory. So we’re actually switching. But we’ll leave that for a more detailed discussion in books and programs and things. But it’s exactly right, that nature is asking us to be careful of our safety. But it’s also saying, “Explore, explore, explore. Move outward.”

There’s a reason human beings go everywhere and climb everything and go down to the bottom of the ocean. It’s a strong part of our nature. And I think finding a balance … The culture right now, a lot of culture, and I think advertising culture is a big part of this, like you said, is “I should never be uncomfortable, not ever.” And nature says, “Learn when being uncomfortable is useful to expand your comfort zone and learn when being uncomfortable is a signal that you have to withdraw.” And there’s a difference. There’s a fine qualitative difference that we do not find because we’re so convenient sized. We’re so comfortable.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s really interesting because instead of just talking about courage, now you’re actually talking about a skill that can be developed, a sense of the difference between danger and discomfort.

Martha Beck:
It’s so interesting. Like going down to South Africa to our friends there, our friends, the Vartys, have lived in the bush and South Africa for a long time. And I remember going out for a little Jeep jaunt with Boyd driving, Boyd Varty driving once, and we came around a corner and an elephant attacked us, like full on trumpeting, ears flapping. It was loud and it was close. And Boyd switched into reverse, looked back the way you do, and he backed off saying, “It’s okay, friend. It’s okay.” So there was that. And then one day we were just sitting with him on the deck with the whole family, and I didn’t hear or see anything, and every single one of them turned, like a herd of gazelles, toward a sound. And they were like, “What’s that?” And they all went up and looked over the deck, and there was a leopard there and there was a child there, and yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
They had learned the difference between being calm because there’s an elephant attacking you, but he doesn’t really mean business, right to the birds just stopped chirping or they gave an alarm call under a bush over there, and that means there’s a cobra over there and there could be … It is a skill that can be learned, and nature teaches it to humans. But when we’re out of the context of nature, we have more trouble finding that instinct, I think.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, I love that so much, and it just reinforces the idea of the only way to hone that ability is to continuously expose yourself to different kinds of experiences, that we shall not cease from exploration. If we’re always exploring, then it’s almost like that in itself will keep us sharp.

And I just suddenly thought about in The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron, she talks about going on an artist date, taking yourself off by yourself once a week and going and doing something different, walking down a different street, going to a place you don’t usually go. And it’s almost like it could be as simple as that. Not that I’m getting prescriptive, but I just think whenever we walk down a different street, we think different thoughts. We’re actually honing those instincts, right?

Martha Beck:
You’re absolutely right, because when I’m talking about the left hemisphere amygdala, what triggers it is not … Well, it triggers both the amygdala, but not necessarily danger, but unfamiliarity. So it can be turned into either fear or curiosity and exploration, and seeing something different will trigger it. And that’s a way-

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like.

Martha Beck:
Yeah?

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry. It’s like that thing with a puppy, when you get a puppy and it’s a really good idea to, before they’re six months old, expose them to all these different things like have them walk between two parked cars, have them encounter someone on crutches or someone with a long skirt, someone with a hat on, someone with a beard, and have these different experiences because the way that their brains develop, probably very similar to ours, is if you hit six months, which I guess is a point of maturity in their brain or development, then they have to treat the unfamiliar as potentially dangerous.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And-

Martha Beck:
And their brains are a lot like ours and like many other social primates, but I think I’ve talked about this before, our brains are different in one crucially, brilliantly fascinating way, and that is we have a mutation called neoteny, which means “the preservation of the new.” In other animals, there’s an abrupt cutoff of learning and the curiosity of babyhood that comes when they hit puberty. In our case, the reason we look different from other apes, we look like baby monkeys. When you see chimpanzees or monkeys on TV, they’ll often be the babies because they’re more attractive to us. They look more like we do. Flat faces. They don’t have jutting jaws. They don’t have really heavy overhanging brows. We don’t have fangs. We have little teeth, and we show them to each other in smiles to say, “I won’t bite you” the way baby monkeys do. We never hit the point where the brain stops maturing unless we stop learning, unless we stop having new experience.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. So is there a mirror image thing here than with making the world bigger in the neoteny and the continuous learning? Is that a mirror image analogy to the cycle of the world becoming smaller and smaller if we don’t?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Because it’s like, what’s the opposite of learning? It’s like every-day contracting.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and it’s not unlearning. There’s this unlearning thing where you unlearn what culture teaches you, but then there’s unlearning that is like, “I forgot that I used to have fun doing something because I haven’t done it for so long.” It’s withered. It’s not just that you’ve unlearned it. It literally withers. The neural connections in the brain wither like plants. So yeah, you’re absolutely right. You can start to use curiosity as a compulsion, almost, to lean into discomfort. So if you really want something or you’re really curious about something and it scares you, leaning into the discomfort and staying present with the discomfort, this is what a lot of meditation is about, staying present with the discomfort until that fear response calms down is how you make your world bigger.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve got a meditation for you.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and imagine that your coffee has been put on a cup warmer for the first time. You take a deep sip of lovely, warm coffee. You haven’t touched it for a little while, but you know it’ll be warm. Unbeknownst to you, a skin has formed on the top of your cup of coffee because it’s warm, right? And also, just imagine in this visualization that you’re doing a podcast in this moment.

Martha Beck:
Wait, wait, wait. I got it. Okay, I got it. I got it. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
All right. So now there’s a long brown skin hanging out of your mouth.

Martha Beck:
Oh, God.

Rowan Mangan:
Luckily someone else is talking right now, so you’re able to save it. Lean into this milky skin.

Martha Beck:
I have a slab of milk skin on my chin.

Rowan Mangan:
Just lean into the discomfort. It’s great.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. Here’s the thing. Your life is getting bigger right now because-

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
… if we can just get you to just stay with this, you’ll be able … I can see right now the slab of coffee milk skin on your cheek. Don’t wipe it away. Don’t. You don’t need to. Just be with it.

Rowan Mangan:
This would never happen in a tiny house.

Martha Beck:
Just be with the milky skin. There’s actually-

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I’m so sorry for derailing, but I just couldn’t let that go completely unacknowledged because it was a big thing just happened to me.

Martha Beck:
Ah. There’s actually a story that Liz Gilbert tells into her book, Big Magic, about a man who had to be with discomfort. He was an artist. He went to Paris to study. He was a penniless artist or whatever, and he went to a party that was hosted by his patron who was a wealthy woman.

Rowan Mangan:
You’ve told this on the podcast before, but it bears repeating.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Just tell it.

Martha Beck:
It was a costume party, and he went and got this amazing lobster costume. He was like a human sized lobster, and he had these big claws and everything. And he went into the party of all these wealthy people, and it was a Louis the Fourteenth costume party. Everyone was dressed in brocades and silks and wigs and whatever, and he was a lobster. And he had to make a decision right there. “Do I flee from this party or do I go in and take it like a man and a woman or whatever?” And he went in, and he was the life of the party.

Rowan Mangan:
The reason that story is so funny is that it’s also operating on an American in Europe.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Like social mores type stuff, right?

Martha Beck:
Oh my God. Anyway, the whole point is that what makes you safe in the world is your ability to tolerate discomfort until you can learn what actually is dangerous. And that is what makes you safe. The will to explore until you know for sure.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, the ability to trust yourself, to tell the difference between discomfort and danger.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
Trusting yourself in that, that’s how you are safe.

Martha Beck:
And is there a risk? Doesn’t that mean there’s a risk that you could go too far? Yes. That’s nature. There will always, always, always be a risk that something could hurt you. And if you just stay in your tiny room, your tiny house for the rest of your life, in your van or whatever, nature is still going to come get you. You’re going to die. So yeah, there’s a level of risk that is necessary to exercise courage. It’s not foolishness, but the way you stay safe is to be willing to explore until you get a keener and keener sense of what’s real danger and what is actually just unfamiliarity.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And then the reason we keep exploring, which we haven’t even touched on in this podcast, is for all the things that life is, all the experiences and the richness of what it is to be alive. So yes, we’re moving into our discomfort, but it’s in the direction of our deepest longing. It’s in the direction of our dreams. It’s towards all that makes life remarkable.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and that makes life risky. But I’m going to do another thing I’ve done before on the podcast, which is to quote Helen Keller, who said, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” You want some life, you’ve got to walk right into discomfort, taste every flavor of discomfort, and sit with it. Savor it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Become a connoisseur of discomfort because that’s called life experience.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and you talk about the small acts of courage.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Yeah, and that’s stopping your life getting small.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So I’ll tell you what I will do right after we get off this recording. I’m actually going to email a person I should have emailed a long time ago, and every day that I haven’t emailed this person, I become more anxious. And it’s become almost intolerable for me to even think about it, but I’m going to go email them.

Rowan Mangan:
Great.

Martha Beck:
That’s my act of courage.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m going to-

Martha Beck:
Hate it.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m going to stare down this cup of coffee and maybe talk to a parent at a school pickup.

Martha Beck:
Little and little and little. Little by little it, you start to branch out. And actually, if you can get the trend shifting away from shrinking into growing, it does at a certain point pick up some momentum and you start to have a richer life. And it’s not comfort that makes it. It’s courage.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And one thing I want to do is come to value courage more in myself in this context as something that I can claim and practice and that can be a thing about me, is that I practice courage.

Martha Beck:
And even value. What I’m taking away from this is everybody values courage, at least in name, but I want to value my discomfort. As long as it’s in the direction of my longing, I want to say, when I’m in meditation, “Here comes a feeling. This is really uncomfortable. How valuable this is going to be! I’m going to sit here and I’m going to let it soak through me until I-”

Rowan Mangan:
I’m just thinking of that skin. The coffee soaking through me. Sorry. Oh.

Martha Beck:
Stay with it, Ro. Stay with it. I’m going to come in where you are as soon as we’re done with this and just put coffee skins all over you and it’s going to be so enriching.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
And your courage and your discomfort are going to be legendary.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I can only imagine. Well, I’ll try to be brave.

Martha Beck:
Okay. All of all y’all out there, stay brave. Lean in to discomfort. Make your comfort grow and stay wild!

Rowan Mangan: 
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show.

For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.